pat357 wrote:No, the 166S is in fact a bad DVD reader.
It seems LiteON makes cheap DVD readers today, at cost of quality.
The older model however DVD LTD-163 and LTD-163D are very good, but it seems due cutting to much in cost, the quality of the latest DVD reader, the 166S, is much worse than the 163(D). It's sad......
See also my post about the "166S can't read DVD+RW", you'll see in detail why I think this way about the 166S.
pat357, although I appreciate your opinion based on your bad experience, I think you shouldn't generalize based on it at this point. As far as I can tell you gave up on the 166S before determining whether your problem with the 166S was isolated or common to all 166S drives. Others have reported that their 166S drives can read DVD+R, and it is specified to do so, so you may have just had the unfortunate luck to get your hands on a bad batch. Of course, you may be correct. Maybe quality control has suffered. But I think it would be premature to generalize based on two bad drives in one system.
By the way, you never gave the serial numbers for both your drives. I was wondering if, based on the serial numbers, it could be determined that both came from the same batch.
cfitz